CampusProgress.org | Modern Abolition

An organization called the Not for Sale Campaign is using students and citizens to end slavery and human trafficking in our lifetime.

By Rebecca Foerg-Spittel
April 5, 2010

A young Nepalese girl with a flier explaining how to avoid human traffickers. Poverty-stricken women in Nepal are frequently sold into slavery. (Flickr/The Emancipation Network)

An Egyptian girl had been trafficked to Orange County, where she lived in a house from about 10 to 12 years old. There she slept on a dog bed in the garage, did household chores, and suffered as sex slave for the family’s husband. Her story is one of many that inspire American activist Christina Hebets, international operations manager and head of the student movement at the Not for Sale Campaign (NFSC), a campaign that works to raise awareness about human trafficking and end modern-day slavery. “One day, the neighbor saw this girl mopping the floor of the kitchen and wondered, why isn’t this girl ever in school?” she says.

This girl eventually got out of the situation, but she is only one of 27 million people enslaved across the globe. These are huge numbers, and although on the TV news it can seem like a faraway problem belonging to places like Nepal and Thailand, it’s not. It exists right now in the United States, in just as many small suburban towns as big cities, and involving women and men from all over the globe—most notably Asian countries like Cambodia, South East Asian countries like India and Pakistan, and Eastern European countries like Albania. They’ve sewn your clothes, harvested the cocoa that became your chocolate bar, huddled in the corner of the local massage parlor, or they’re hidden in your neighbors’ houses as domestic servants.

According to Siddharth Kara’s 2008 book, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, 1.2 million people are trafficked for sexual exploitation, 1.5 million are trafficked for other labor, and 18.1 million have not been trafficked, but are enslaved. Annual profits from slave labor are actually highest in North America, averaging about $57, 975. The second highest is in the Middle East.

Groups like the NFSC, founded by former University of San Francisco professor David Batstone, and a handful of his former USF students, are using a mix of activism, advocacy, and outreach to end this reality. NFSC’s ultimate goal is to “end slavery within our lifetime.” It’s an organization that reaches out to as many demographic groups as possible—church organizations, advocacy groups, government, and students. They operate a youth arm, the Student Abolitionist Movement.

“It’s really easy to turn the other cheek…if there’s [only] a couple people saying, you know, ‘there’s slaves in your chocolate,’” Hebets says, but NFSC is working to make the problem increasingly visible, focusing especially on the consumer role this year. Hebets and NFSC hope that consumer consciousness about the issue will catch on. “It’s kind of like the whole green movement,” she says, “…even a few years ago, people were like, ‘oh, crazy environmental activists,’ but now it’s like the cool thing to be green, to buy eco-friendly materials.” NFSC’s idea is to encourage consumers to demand goods made without the benefit of human trafficking or slave labor just like many demand green products. It takes comparatively little effort to become a better-informed consumer and make better choices, and nothing speaks to big corporations like demand.

NFSC’s latest work on American consumption has been advocating a bill introduced by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the Customs Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Reauthorization Act. Two sections of the bill deal with “goods made with forced or indentured labor or by benefit of human trafficking.” But the bill hasn’t moved at all in recent months. These rules essentially already existed, but the new versions in the reauthorization allow for the regulations to actually be enforced, by closing an egregious loophole in previous versions of the law.

No matter what information regulators have on cases of human trafficking, they have no authority to prosecute companies under current law. The new bill lays out direct consequences for violating the law, to be enforced by a newly created Office of Labor Enforcement. The OLE will be part of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency of the Department of Homeland Security. They hope that if this bill is passed that this will put enough pressure on American companies to start a definitive movement away from the use of exploitative business practices.

Though the idea is simple, it can be a tough sell in Washington because lobbyists from companies who don’t want to spend the money or time on changing their practices are pushing against the bill. Companies such as Wal-Mart, Kraft, Mars, and General Electric have been lobbying against the bill. However, after speaking with, leaving messages for, and emailing with their representatives, Campus Progress never got from those companies a statement of their position on the bill.

In early March, the Washington, D.C., branch of NFSC’s “Global Advocacy Days,” trained a group of students at George Washington University on how to be advocates on the Senate’s bill. (Advocacy days also took place in Ottawa on March 24-25.) NFSC depends on students around the country to report instances of human trafficking on slaverymap.org, to start their own NFSC organizations at their respective schools, or to be Ambassadors, raising money on a monthly basis for international NFSC projects that they choose. They hold academies across the country to teach students how to do their own investigation and advocacy work. Students are even state directors—Jamee Herbert is a Connecticut state director and a senior at the College of Holy Cross.

This reliance on students is no accident. Hebets was once part of Batstone’s year-long class, which took its social justice focus as human trafficking and modern day slavery. It was there that she began her work as an activist. Hebets says that human trafficking “just fell in my lap.”

NFSC works to make human trafficking fall in the lap of students across the country. Hebets says, “Students are able to mobilize and they have resources behind them whether that be funding from the university or a requirement for a class, or the sheer fact that they want to be engaged, and we’re kind of a new generation of advocates and conscious consumers.”

Students are discovering their own ways to make a difference. At the Advocacy Days, one student from Clemson University was beginning his own jeans company and wants to make it fair trade and slavery-free. Another student from Gainesville State College in Florida came to Advocacy Days because she tutors girls who have been able to get out of sex trafficking. Others were involved in ministries or school clubs, and there was a whole contingent from a school of social work. Hebets sees this as part of a greater pattern of young people. She says, “We care about global issues, we care about moral issues, not necessarily for the religious reasons or because we’re liberals, it’s just a common mentality that is emerging, and that’s fortunate for this movement.”

Advocates like those at NFSC are working for one particular reason—the 9, 10, and 11 year olds who are trafficked and enslaved, the vulnerable of the third world open to exploitation, like the Egyptian girl in Orange County. Whatever advances they make, the 27 million people affected by trafficking still exist as a powerful reason for students and citizens to be aware, get involved, and end slavery within our lifetime.

Rebecca Foerg-Spittel is an editorial intern at Campus Progress.


CampusProgress.org | Modern Abolition

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